Raymond Chandler was born 124 years ago, in Chicago, Illinois, on July 23, 1888. After her divorce from his father, his mother took him to England in 1900, where they lived in her mother's London home. Forgoing college, he spent time in France and Germany before returning to England and becoming a naturalized citizen so he could take the Civil Service exam and go to work for the Admiralty. (He regained his American citizenship in 1956.)
After a year of that, he tried his hand unsuccessfully at journalism, although he did get some of his poetry published. Borrowing money from an uncle (repaid with 6% interest) he returned to the States in 1912. He moved to Los Angeles with his mother in 1913 and eventually got a job with a creamery until WWI when he joined the Canadian Expeditionary Forces, serving in France with the Gordon Highlanders before getting flight training from the new Royal Air Force.
When the war was over, he returned to Los Angeles and fell in love with Cissy Pascal, a married woman 18 years his senior. Even after Cissy divorced her husband, Chandler's mother would not sanction the union so the couple waited until after her death in 1923 to marry on Feb 6, 1924.
Starting as a bookeeper, he eventually became the vice president of a Southern California oil syndicate before his alcohol abuse resulted in his termination in 1932. There are suggestions that skirt chasing and suicide attempts were also involved.
In order to make ends meet, he turned his hand to writing stories for the pulp magazine Black Mask. As he explained to his English publisher:
Wandering up and down the Pacific Coast in an automobile I began to read pulp magazines, because they were cheap enough to throw away and because I never had at any time any taste for the kind of thing which is known as women's magazines. This was in the great days of the Black Mask (if I may call them great days) and it struck me that some of the writing was pretty forceful and honest, even though it had its crude aspect. I decided that this might be a good way to try to learn to write fiction and get paid a small amount of money at the same time. I spent five months over an 18,000 word novelette and sold it for $180. After that I never looked back, although I had a good many uneasy periods looking forward
When his wife died in 1954, Chandler began drinking again and suffered from a depression that led to a suicide attempt. Although still involved with other women, he did not marry again and died on March 26, 1959
In
The Simple Art of Murder, which he originally wrote for Atlantic Monthly and later included in a book of short stories by the same name, Chandler discusses the hard-boiled detective mystery and how it grew and differed from the existing mystery novels of the time that were written mostly by the English.
Using The Red House Mystery, by A. A. Milne, demonstrates by the numbers, how lacking in credibility the deductive mystery can be. Much like an autopsy, Chandler enumerates the flaws of logic that Milne had to trust his readers to ignore.
He makes clear his disdain for the cozy genre of the English mysteries:
But fundamentally it is the same careful grouping of suspects, the same utterly incomprehensible trick of how somebody stabbed Mrs. Pottington Postlethwaite III with the solid platinum poniard just as she flatted on the top note of the “Bell Song” from Lakmé in the presence of fifteen ill-assorted guests; the same ingénue in fur-trimmed pajamas screaming in the night to make the company pop in and out of doors and ball up the timetable; the same moody silence next day as they sit around sipping Singapore slings and sneering at each other, while the flatfeet crawl to and fro under the Persian rugs, with their derby hats on.
He presents the hard-boiled detective novel as being a realistic look at murder, using Hammett as an example:
Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever, but it looked like a good idea to get as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing.
Hammett wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.
He also challenges the view that mysteries are somehow lesser literature by being escapist in nature.
All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings. It is one of the things that distinguish them from the three-toed sloth; he apparently—one can never be quite sure—is perfectly content hanging upside down on a branch, not even reading Walter Lippmann. I hold no particular brief for the detective story as the ideal escape. I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.
There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.
If Dashiel Hammett laid the foundation for the modern detective novel, Raymond Chandler put up the drywall and in so doing, defined the hard-boiled detective for generations to come.
In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.
He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks—that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.
The full text of the essay can be found online
here, and is well worth the few minutes it would take to read all of it.
Raymond Chandler created one of the archetypes of the hard-boiled detective in Philip Marlowe, who, in
The Big Sleep, is one who "has a range of awareness that startles you," as this passage, narrated by Marlowe, demonstrates
Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.
In
The Big Sleep, Marlowe is hired by a bedridden man to find out who is attempting to blackmail him for his youngest daughter's indiscretions. He also expresses concern with the whereabouts of the husband of his older daughter, although Marlowe is not tasked to find him. The plot is so complex, with so many characters and red herrings and betrayals that it can't really be discussed without giving something away.
But there are actually two mysteries that require solving, and if you use an e-reader you may be surprised to find that what appears to be an ending is actually only the beginning of the second mystery. Along the way there are plenty of long-legged blonde bombshells and slimy crooks. And a good look at the seamy underbelly of Los Angeles during the 1930s.
The novel is filled with Chandler's highly original metaphors and similes:
Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.
The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.
The giggles got louder and ran around the corners of the room like rats behind the wainscoting.
And trademark wit:
“Tall, aren’t you?” she said.
“I didn’t mean to be.”
"You’re broke, eh?”
“I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.”
Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.
“I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintace. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights.”
His lyrical descriptive talent adds technicolor detail to the bare bones, black and white, style of Dashiel Hammett as he advances the American hard-boiled detective genre another step forward. It is upon the work of these two writers, and the writers, like James M. Cain, of the Black Mask era that all of the present day noir mysteries are based.
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